#10 Researching PTSD

I have been researching PTSD (especially war-related) and there's so much information out there -- not a lot of it encouraging. It seems to me that it will be like an alcoholic -- they learn to live with it, they fight it, but it is always a part of them. I have a girlfriend here who is a counselor (MSW) who has given me one of her reference books... this one on a new PTSD therapy called "guided imagery". on the theory that traumatic events bypass the language portion of the brain and are recorded in the visual area of the brain and that talking makes things worse, but bringing someone from "bad" images through to "good" images allows patients to deal systematically and visually with the trauma...

as with anything that is more art than science, there are many different forms of treatment -- some quackery and some hard science and some forms work for some and not for others. One of the things that differentiates war-related PTSD from other forms of it is that they typically don't have the portion where they blame themselves for the trauma inflicted on them -- but carry much greater levels of survivor guilt and "inertia regret" (that they couldn't be there to save someone or to stop a bomb or a bullet to save someone else not themselves... and there is a whole 'nother "blame structure" (i.e., the chain of command) that is involved in their thinking (why didn't we have more troops, why didn't we have that weapon or ammo or whatever). It's so complicated.